Home Spirituality 5 Insightful Buddhism Books Released in September 2025

5 Insightful Buddhism Books Released in September 2025

Featured image with five book covers — Traveling in Bardo, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, Tassajara Stories, Mountain Dharma, and The Silence of Falling Snow — from Balanced Achievement’s September 2025 Buddhism book list.
written by Patrick Zeis
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Whether you’re drawn to Tibetan practices, Zen history, or the Buddha’s enduring story, September offers a remarkable collection of new Buddhist books. Each of these five titles opens a unique doorway into the dharma, illuminating how its wisdom continues to shape lives across time and place.

Cover of The Silence of Falling Snow by Kristjana Gunnars, included in Balanced Achievement’s September 2025 picks for the best Buddhism books.

5.) The Silence of Falling Snow — Kristjana Gunnars:

With the lyricism of a poet and the depth of a philosopher, Kristjana Gunnars’s The Silence of Falling Snow transforms grief into a meditation on art, care, and Buddhist wisdom. Weaving memories of accompanying her husband to his final days with reflections on Gautama Buddha, Renaissance masters, and contemporary thinkers, Gunnars creates a text that is at once memoir, essay, and meditation. The result is a consoling and invigorating work—an intellectual cabaret and a tender portrait of love and impermanence. Award-winning poet Kazim Ali offered praise for the book, saying:

What do we know about what we don’t know? What are we willing to not-know about what we think we know? Kristjana Gunnars has always been a writer willing to write in between and through genres to find her way into the bewildering space of true inquiry. Using a range of touchstones, including films, literature, painting, sculpture, theology, philosophy, the history of the city of Oslo and the ancient Pali canon of Buddhist teachings, as well as a searing interrogation of trauma and tragedy in her own life, Gunnars confronts, interrogates, and illuminates the excruciating relational networks between grief and the creative life.

Cover of Mountain Dharma: Meditative Retreat and the Tibetan Ascetic Self by David M. DiValerio, highlighted in Balanced Achievement’s September 2025 Buddhism book picks.

4.) Mountain Dharma — David M. DiValerio:

For centuries, Tibetan Buddhism has revered the solitary hermit who seeks awakening in caves, huts, and remote valleys—and in Mountain Dharma: Meditative Retreat and the Tibetan Ascetic Self, David M. DiValerio illuminates this little-understood tradition. Tracing retreat instructions from the twelfth through the twentieth century, he reveals how questions of food, danger, lineage, and time shaped the evolution of the Tibetan ascetic self. Groundbreaking in scope and meticulously researched, the book sets a new standard for the study of Buddhist asceticism. In the book’s introduction, DiValerio writes:

While religious asceticism may look to outside observers like a cutting off or an end, for the practitioner that seeming end in actuality marks the beginning of a new way of being. This book is about what goes on in the space that is created upon renouncing ordinary life… Using the example of individual long-term meditative retreat in Tibetan Buddhism, this study details how, rather than being an island unto themselves or a disembodied consciousness, the religious ascetic exists in a world of positive relations—to places and things, to other people, and to their own being.

Cover of The Buddha: Biography of a Myth by Donald S. Lopez Jr., selected as one of Balanced Achievement’s September 2025 Buddhism book picks.

3.) The Buddha — Donald S. Lopez Jr.:

From one of the world’s leading Buddhist scholars comes The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, an unprecedented exploration of the Enlightened One beyond the bounds of history. Donald S. Lopez Jr. draws on centuries of texts and scholarship to trace the Buddha’s journey from birth to nirvana while probing the very foundations of his historicity. Brilliantly written and richly provocative, the book invites us to see the Buddha not only as a sage but also as a mythic presence whose story continues to inspire. Lopez writes:

The goal of so many biographies of the Buddha is to find the man behind the myth. I argue in this book that that man cannot be found. And I argue that the man that some claim to find, the philosopher who died from an attack of dysentery, is not the man from whom Buddhists have sought refuge from suffering for more than two millennia… In a real sense, to argue that the Buddha in all his glory, like all the buddhas that preceded him in all their glory, was not a historical figure is an argument that is authentically Buddhist. We need not abandon the search in despair. Instead, we renounce the search for a self that was never there.

Cover of Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West by David Chadwick, a September 2025 Balanced Achievement Buddhism book pick.

2.) Tassajara Stories — David Chadwick:

In Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West—The First Year, 1967, David Chadwick transports readers back to the birth of Zen in America. Blending memoir and oral history, he captures the spirit of Suzuki Roshi’s pioneering students—their earnest practice, playful eccentricities, and the communal energy that transformed a remote mountain valley into a landmark of Western Buddhism. Both lively and reverent, the book reads like a time capsule of an era when counterculture and dharma converged. Accomplished American writer Cathy Lynn Grossman shared her thoughts on the book, saying:

David Chadwick’s latest book on the expansion of Buddhism in America—Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West—The First Year, 1967—takes readers back to the early days of the monastery founded by Buddhis master Shunryu Suzuki in a mountainous California forest…. [H]e introduces people who hammered the Tassajara facility together, baked the bread, meditated, mediated, and created ‘a community and a commune’ where they could study and practice.

Cover of Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World by Ann Tashi Slater, featured in Balanced Achievement’s September 2025 Buddhism book picks.

1.) Traveling in Bardo — Ann Tashi Slater:

Blending memoir, Buddhist philosophy, and evocative storytelling, Ann Tashi Slater’s Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World illuminates how every ending carries within it the seed of a beginning. From monasteries to modern cities, from ancestral stories to present-day struggles, Slater explores how the Tibetan view of bardo can transform our relationship with loss and change. The result is a work both grounding and liberating—a companion for anyone navigating life’s inevitable transitions. Slater writes:

During over forty years of writing and speaking about my family history and Buddhism, I’ve come to see how Tibetan bardo wisdom on the fleeting nature of existence can transform the way we live. By showing us how to become more accepting of the uncertainty, transitions, and endings we all must face sooner or later, the bardo teachings free us to live more fully, embracing life in all its sorrow and joy.

The Best Books for Personal Growth Published in 2025

If you’re interested in exploring other recently released inspirational books, across a variety of different genres related to personal growth, we invite you to check out our other articles showcasing some of the best to be published in 2025:

January’s Best Books:

February’s Best Books:

March’s Best Books:

April’s Best Books:

May’s Best Books:

June’s Best Books:

July’s Best Books:

August’s Best Books:

September’s Best Books:

October’s Best Books:

November’s Best Books:

December’s Best Books:

Affiliate Link Disclosure: Balanced Achievement earns a commission when any of the books featured on our site are purchased directly through Amazon product links.

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Patrick Zeis is a mindfulness meditation teacher and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. Trained in the teaching lineage of Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, he has maintained a dedicated meditation practice for over 15 years, accumulating thousands of hours of sustained practice and study. His teaching integrates Western mindfulness, Eastern contemplative traditions, modern psychological science, and evolutionary psychology into a clear, grounded approach to meditation practice. He is the author of Meditation Masters: Spiritual Wisdom From Our Greatest Teachers and writes extensively on spirituality, psychology, and personal development at BalancedAchievement.com.

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